Kubera-edelweiss Social Innovation Honours

Kubera-Edelweiss honour three NGOs for innovative work in the area of Girl-Child • First Kubera-Edelweiss Social Innovation Honours • Total award of $60,000 • Anjali, Azad Foundation & Samata are the winners for their innovative and outstanding work for the Girl Child in Health, Employability & Education fields Mumbai March 5, 2009: An organization training girls from Delhi slums to be professional taxi drivers, another working on mental health issues of mothers and young girls from Kolkata and an NGO responsible for introducing innovative research and education programmes for tribal girls in Andhra Pradesh, have won the first Kubera-Edelweiss Social Innovation Honours (KESIH). KESIH is a unique, joint Corporate Social Responsibility initiative of Kubera Patners, a US based private equity firm and Edelweiss, one of India’s leading financial services companies. The award will give seed funding of USD 60,000 to three non-governmental organizations (NGOs) working to improve the status of the girl child in the areas of health, education and employability. Anjali, the Kolkata based NGO has received the award in the Health category while Azad Foundation from Delhi and Samata from Andhra Pradesh received the award respectively in Employability and Education categories respectively. The winners have been selected from a pool of 118 participants across India, vetted by Tata Institute of Social Sciences (TISS) and EdelGive Foundation, the philanthropic arm of Edelweiss. The selection involved a four-stage evaluation process, supported by Ernst and Young as process advisors and official tabulators and field visits by TISS. The final jury members included Farida Lambay, VicePrincipal of Nirmala Niketan College of Social Work, Zia Mody, corporate lawyer, AZB & Partners, Devaki Jain, development economist and activist, Ramanan Raghavendran, Managing Partner, Kubera Partners, Harsh Mander, human rights activist and author, Shekhar Gupta, Editor-in-Chief, The Indian Express, Shivnath Thukral, Managing Editor, NDTV Profit and Indu Shahani, Sheriff of Mumbai.